“the dog was small. we wrapped it up in a trash bag and took it to the dump. i had to heave it over the fence, which was higher than i'd remembered. the dog hit the top of it and fell back to the pavement. the plastic snapped in the wind. i picked it up. fuck, she said, standing by the car, do you need help.”

A toaster thus is not essentially a toaster, but a toaster only insofar as toasters have been socially constructed for us by the dominant classes: rectangular and electric, with double slots for dual slices of bread mysteriously analogous to the principle of binary oppositions most systems of thought are founded upon. The entire wall is then covered up with more paint, and all that’s left for viewers to see is the white, massive trace of erasure—a literal whitewash. A poignant sense of loss accompanies the glaring absence, made blinding in certain angles by the light that strikes it from the ceiling.

You
can sleep
now / bow out

this
gospel, look
away / please / think

still
ascending as
the plane is

slanted
upwards. Not
feeling well, sick,

get
up quickly
to go to

the
bathroom … must
get to the

bathroom …
I feel
faint, suddenly may

never
wake up.
Next thing on

the
floor the
passengers above me

are
[what word??]
peering I tell

them
fainted they
all make a

buzzing
noise that
sounds like ‘yeast’.

[Note: Sources: the last of the GR poems. One interpolation to bring this up to merely “normal” sonnet-size.

22.12.2008

Someone’s got a bomb, someone’s got a gun,
and the prayers that come and go, bouncing off
brick walls, between the muddled hallelujahs,
sound like someone whispering fire, fire, fire.

Tourist
campaigns
have given us

a
state cookie.
We live in

the
ancient Egyptian
time. Their myths

are
ours. The
Rio Grande is

the
Blue Nile.
Gypsy moths infested,

caterpillars
wriggled from
the sky, ideas

are

at

the

broken

heart
of my
thinking, synapses and

neurons
have failed
to transmit critical

information
to the
brain. Elvis, what happened?

Indeed,
Jesus Christ
was the pulse

of
the left
in his time,

and
constructed words
like “mythunderstanding” make

you
chuckle aloud,
a lone consonant,

a ‘Y’,
followed by
a list of

numbers
with here
we go and

there
you go,
as in again,

say
somebody took
out the wager

and
never came
back. “La noche

es
bella / fresca,
oscura, limpia” … the

dragonfly
is “azul
y valiente / blue

and
brave.” And
the song goes

“oh
the passing
train feels a

sadness,
but heads
on down the

line.”
I mean,
etcetera is rendering

the verb “to say”. This knot is both a material object that can be manipulated and a metaphor for the structure of the subject. The knot, made up of three rings, is characterized by how the rings (representing the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary) interlock and support each other. From this point on in Lacan's teaching, the real was no longer an opaque and terrifying unconceptualizable entity. Rather, it is positioned right alongside the symbolic and tied to it by mediation of the imaginary. Thus, whatever our capacity for symbolizing and imagining, there remains an irreducible realm of the nonmeaning, and that is where the real is located.

And
the song
goes “relate much

to
World0, the
tangible intangible “something,””

carrying
yellow between
us / is pasture,

soul—
(“DAY WITH
DIVINE FEROCITY”), where

will
the I
be -- in the

light
of a
spider chandelier? you

must
gut the
rainbow trout before

you
fry it.
When I am

re-
invented I
wish to be

a
fizz or
a trinket. What

I
want for
then’s a narrow

well-
worn path
down to the

water
with the
other claymation characters.

[Notes: the 3rd in the GR supersonnet thing. And, of course, the 3rd for Eileen.

7 Shin Yu Pai, untitled, at Makura No Soshi, 20 Dec 08; Geof Huth, “Deerhead Oration: The Tincture of Her Shroud”, at dbqp, 19 Dec 08; Collin Kelly, “In Harlem”, as quoted in Robert E. Wood’s review of Kelley’s After the Poison; James Stotts, review of In Company: An Anthology Of New Mexico Poets After 1960 (eds. Lee Bartlett, V.B. Price and Dianne Edenfield Edwards), and Rudolfo Anaya, “Isis in the Heart”, as quoted by Stotts; Kate Colby, as quoted in Denise Dooley’s review of Colby’s Unbecoming Behavior; Tom Beckett, in his review of John Bloomberg-Rissman’s World0 and No Sounds Of My Own Making; Logan Ryan Smith, as quoted in Michael Caylo-Baradi’s review of Smith’s The Singers, and Caylo-Baradi himself. Wendy Lynn Cohen, in her review of Joan Retallack’s How To Do Things With Words; Christopher Rizzo, “I Can’t Get Started”, as quoted in Lars Palm’s review of Rizzo’s Playing the Amplitudes; Susan Gardner, “Deseos Nocturnos/Desires in the Night”, “Al Pie de Black Mesa/Below Black Mesa”, as quoted in Karen An-Hwei Lee’s review of Gardner’s Box of Light/Caja de Luz; Allan Bramhall, “Walden Pond In Rain”, as quoted in Jeff Harrison’s review of Bramhall’s Walden Book; Susan Tichy, ‘‘Street’’, as quoted in Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s review of Tichy’s Bone Pagoda, and Sze-Lorrain herself; Martine Lerude, “Real, The (Lacan)”, in the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, as quoted by John Bloomberg-Rissman, in his review of Principal Hand 001, aka the infamous Issue 1 (eds. Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter); Fiona Sze-Lorrain, in her review of Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts & Affections (eds. Arielle Greenberg & Rachel Zucker); Jill Magi, “Day With Divine Ferocity”, as quoted in Eileen Tabios’ review of Magi’s Torchwood; Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, “Dying”, as quoted in Karen An-Hwei Lee’s review of Kageyama-Ramakrishnan’s Shadow Mountain; Edmund Berrigan, “Disturningly”, Jennifer L Knox, “If Not Now then Next”, in Patrick James Dunagan’s review of Knox’s Drunk by Noon and Berrigan’s Glad Stone Children, and Dunagan himself]

a
metalogical mirror,
a poufed-out plastic bag blows by,
‘Pathmark’ is what it says.
This is an ambiguous answer,
whatever the question.

Ah,
Heidegger! On
a starry night,

with
so many
fat tickets, or

“Unspeakable”:
Serious stuff,
I’m like / Whatever.

And similarly, Picabia’s formerly ‘poetic’ verbal inscriptions become less a series of lines of flight than an assault and a graffiti once more, the open-ended ‘M…..’ calling up inevitably the Dadaists’ favorite exclamation: Merde. Shit for whomever looks at this! Or better: Fuck anyone who looks at this.

The
r is
missing. But the

processes
were not
utterly dissimilar, those

of
loss and
gain. So I

began
to record
what I saw.

I
turned toward
a room packed

with
babies, and
we were gone,

out
the front
door of a

cold
former palace.
In the car

I
wept. What’s
the matter? Ramesh

asked
Bryant. By
the waters of.

In
the dream
it’s you and

me
and a
lot of other

people.
We’re performing
a long and

complicated
vocal piece
and I love

you
in the
dream. I think

it
lasts about …
twenty minutes, then

they
have to
use the hack

saws.
Both eyes
of the sky

have
cleared, out
back is a

pastiche
of oil
rigs, algae, a

dog,
a fish,
furniture, a plant,

and
a little robot
drawn on a

cut-
out index.
A hammerhead shark,

a
hand-drawn
eye, another little

text robot. Permutations of data and the robotics of human interactions in an anonymous global populace resonate with the Althusserian notion of interpellation, where subjects internalize hegemonic values through the commerce of art and technology. It would be nice, she said, if you would take this patch of blue and make something of it, as he had said it was time to make something of yourself, making something, scratches and doodles, people will look at it, they will have an appetite for such things, they will develop a taste for quiche, for albatross, for moldy bread.

They
will go
by threes. They

will
march in
the streets protesting.

I
tried counting
a couple of

times
and never
came up with

the
same total.
I’m not much

of
a counter.
It doesn’t feel

counter-
intuitive to
attempt such measures

here
though. 180
feels right. A

half-
circle or
possibility of reversal

in
brackets? Vortices?
the streets protesting.

“faint
light” that
“approaches the surf.”

Such
a mode
of interior architecture

is
“sacramental” only
because some “cadre”

of
management gurus
have perceived the

arrangement
as a key
to fulfilling the

“sacred”
task between
: spaced selves // finessive.

The
noise isn’t
necessarily deafening, but

the
cacophony can
be annoying, especially

if
we feel
“amphibious slime” around

our
ankles, as
we wade through

a
“glassy pond”.
“Where will you

turn
up next?
Always, there’s something”

“in
a state
of / suspended / interpretation”

media-
saturated environment
“left to burn”,

[Note: Sources: the first 15 reviews, etc in Galatea Resurrects #11. Like a slightly supersized sonnet, right? The next 15 will be used in FCF 14, and so on, til I’ve sampled the whole issue. Dedicated, as are 14 and the “and so on”, to Eileen Tabios.

As the newsies in the old movies used to say: Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Galatea Resurrects, ISSUE NO. 11 is now live. I have two reviews in it, and, to top it off, Tom Beckett says incredibly kind things about me. But there's way more than that. It's better than online college, kids! (Kids ... tip 'o the proverbial cap to Joanne Kyger ...)

Should,
should a wo/man,
should a wo/man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs [think Eleanor Antin, King of Solana Beach]: s/he could,
if s/he spoke of this
time, s/he
could
only babble and babble
over, over
againagain

or

But if s/he must, the wo/man remains fearless.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Alone before god, simplicity keeps her/him safe.
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp S/He needs no weapons and no cunning,
&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp As long as God’s absence comes to her/his aid.

Table
of Contents:
Incognitum Hactenus / BACTERIAL

ARCHEOLOGY:
NETHER, SUB-
SOIL AND XENO-

CHEMICAL
INSIDERS / Palaeopetrology:
From Gog-Magog

Axis
to Petropunkism
Excursus I: Incomplete

Burning,
Pyrodemonism and
Napalm-obsession / Machines

Are
Digging / Excursus
II: Memory and

( &nbsp&nbsp )hole
complex / Pipeline
Odyssey: The Z

Monologue
EXHUMATIONS: RELICS
AND DIABOLIC PARTICLES

An
Assyrian Relic
Excursus III: Occult,

the
State’s Macropolitics
and Political Pollution

The
Dead Mother
of All Contagions

Excursus
IV: Meteorological
Teratology / Mistmare

Excursus
V: Fog
oil, a retrospection

on
obscurants / THE
LEGION: WARMACHINES, PREDATORS

AND
PESTS / The
Dust Enforcer / Excursus

VI:
Xeno-agents
and the Assyrian

Axis
of Evil-
against-Evil / The

Thing:
White War
and Hypercamouflage / War

as
[my fuckup]
a Machine / Excursus

VII:
The Codex
of Yatu / TELLURIAN

INSURGENCIES:
XERODROME, SOLAR
TEMPESTS AND EARTH-

SUN
AXES / Telluro-
magnetic Conspiracy Towards

the
Sun I:
Solar Rattle / Excursus

VIII:
Barbaric Music
and Vowelless Alphabets

Five
Billion Years
of Hell-engineering

Telluro-
magnetic Conspiracy
Towards the Sun

II:
The Core
Excursus IX: Dracolatry,

Writing
with the
Middle East / Mesopotamian

Axis
of Communication
Excursus X: Az

and
Destrudo / UNCHARTED
REGIONS: CATALYTIC SPACES

Decay
Excursus XI:
Life Modeling / POLYTICS:

COMPLICITY
AND SCHIZOTRATEGIES
FOR OPENNESS AND

INSURGENCY
A Good
Meal: The Schizotrategic

Edge
The Z.
crowd: The Infested

Germ-
cell of
Monotheism / Excursus XII:

The
Heretical Holocaust
Excursus XII: Schizotrategy

and
the Dawn
of Paranoia / Notes

have shown that systems comprised of a large number of elements far from equilibrium are prone to beautiful convulsions called “phase transitions.” In this process, chance associations within the system, after reaching a critical point, undergo spontaneous self-organization. At this point, the Novum—an unexpected, unprecedented superaddition to reality—emerges.